Chris Lintott (Oxford) - Expecting the unexpected: Citizen Science in the Vera Rubin Observatory era

When: Friday, October 21, 2022, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
Where: Physics (G. O. Jones building) room 610 & online

Speaker: Chris Lintott (Oxford)

Expecting the unexpected: Citizen Science in the Vera Rubin Observatory era

Since the first development of the Galaxy Zoo project, which invited hundreds of thousands of volunteers to provide morphological labels for galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, this form of citizen science project has become a standard part of the astronomical tool kit. Reviewing results on quenching in galaxies from Galaxy Zoo, the discovery of unusual exoplanets through the Planet Hunters project and more, this talk will present astronomical results from the Zooniverse platform, which now hosts more than 100 projects, and has more than two million volunteers who have contributed half a billion classifications. Given the advances in machine learning, and in particular in deep learning, in the last fifteen years, Lintott will discuss how the creation of hybrid ‘cyborg’ projects, which combine both human and machine classifications, are the future of large-scale data analysis, and outline what we can expect from future surveys including the Vera Rubin Observatory’s LSST with a particular focus on serendipitous discoveries. There will also be at least one picture of penguins.